Legs

When I was about 10 years-old, it occurred to me that I didn't like my legs. It happened as I was shooting them a sideways glance in a department store mirror and was horror-struck thinking that I had no kneecaps. 

Legs in the Skirt, copyright Teece Aronin. Available on
products at Redbubble.com/people/phylliswalter. 

In that place where my knees were supposed to bow gracefully outward, they didn't; it was as if my “knee yeast” never rose. I pointed this out to my mother who replied with that time-honored retort of mothers everywhere: "You're fine."

Of course, that experience in the department store wasn't enough to deter me from saying you're fine when my own kids complained. Karma bit me for it when I said, "You're fine" to my son minutes before he threw up all over his suit, his shoes, and the interior of my new car on the way to my aunt's funeral.

But that day in the department store did inspire me to buy my swimsuits online as soon as the technology became available.

The other thing is that I have big legs and "cankles," the seamless merge of ankles and calves. My biggest complaint about my cankles is that they make it hard to buy comfortable ankle socks. I'll bet there are enough women with cankles that if someone were to design the cankle sock, that person would make a fortune. I think the biggest argument for cankle socks is that they would be big enough to never get lost in the dryer. 

I haven't worn a dress, pantyhose, and heels at the same time in ages, but I remember that those three items, worn together, did great things for my legs. I still had big legs, but they were big, SEXY legs. Even the cankles stopped being cankles and transformed into the legs’ equivalent to great cleavage.  

My mother's legs were a lot like mine, and my father was crazy about her legs all their lives together. He loved to tell the story about the day he was following her up a steep stairway on his way to meet my grandmother and aunts for the first time. He said my mother kept nervously glancing down at him and clutching the hem of her skirt tight around her legs. He found her bashfulness endearing. 

A while back I was dating a man who said to me, "Your legs are perfectly fine."  

"True," I said, "They move, and they manage to support my weight."

 And I wonder why I'm single. 

He rolled his eyes. "You have what I think of as rich legs, and they're beautiful." When he said that, I got weak in my nonexistent knees. 

So, I'm going to rewrite that old song, When a Man Loves a Woman to sing to myself as needed. I'm calling it, When a Woman Loves Herself and Her Cankles.  

According to My Specs

Last week for the first time, I couldn't find my glasses - because I wasn't wearing them. 

I might keep a few extra 

pairs of glasses around the house - 

or around my face. 

I yelled for my daughter who searched while I trailed her, whining over and over that I couldn't find my glasses without my glasses.

When my daughter found my specs, I put them on with the nerve-racked, shaky-handed gratitude of someone handed nitroglycerin tablets in just the nick of time. I sat on the edge of my creaking old quilt-covered bed, and it hit me: 

- I'm a woman of a certain age. 

- I need my glasses to find my glasses. 

- The bed wasn't creaking, it was me!

Then I realized that glasses had been dangling my future dotage before my failing eyes for years. 

I didn't have children until I was in my forties. When I was forty-three and getting an eye exam, the optometrist broke the news that it was time for my first pair of bifocals. Hand to God, the words that flew from my mouth at that moment were: "I can't need bifocals - I have babies at home!" 

For years I'd thought that dual umbilical cords were carrying sustenance from my ovaries to my eyeballs and that having children that late in life, my eyeballs were returning the favor. But for that to be true, my inner workings would have to look like an Escher print. 

Then there was the adult movie with a scene that depressed me for years. This movie (which I might have heard about, not necessarily seen!) depicted women, age 50-plus, getting a lot of, shall we say, attention, from younger men. A woman in one of the vignettes was wearing reading glasses and never took them off despite them slipping ever closer to the end of her nose. Now I understand that she didn't take them off because she needed them to see what was happening.

Forgetting where I've left my glasses is bound to happen again. And blaming my glasses, as though they're at fault by forgetting where they put my face, won't help. It's time to accept the facts. I'm getting older. 

But that doesn't mean I can't still love who I am, and even who I see whenever I look in the mirror.  And it doesn't mean I can't see myself in the best light possible even if I need the best light possible to see myself. 

We crawl, then we walk, then we walk a little slower. All the better for seeing what's most important and what is truly beautiful.